The background: Hard to believe about Lou Reed, isn’t it? Talk about pervasive influence. He instigated so many schools of thought, invented so many ways for rock musicians to express themselves, you can alight pretty much anywhere and find elements of his DNA. Take today’s new band, whom we decided to feature before Reed died. There are no signs of the European avant garde here, nor are these five Irish boys poets of New York street hassle, but still you hear their music and you think: probably, without old Lou, they would have sounded quite different, and they might not even have existed.

Reed painted rock black, and that’s the colour of the spectrum Spies use. They do dark, and they also do dynamics: the interplay between drummer, bassist and guitarist is theatrical in its intensity, and the singer works hard to maintain the illusion that they are in the eye of the storm. Their timing is excellent. Their music offers a sense that the world is a place where big, frightening things happen, both on a large scale and a personal, intimate level, and that they are here to provide the soundtrack. In that way, they are reminiscent of early U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen, bands that invariably made a drama out of a crisis.

Spies first releases so far are the Liars Call Me King debut EP from late 2010, the 2011 single Barricade and last year’s single, Distant Shorelines. And now there’s the single November Sun. Their first EP featured Fill the Silence, which with its rolling drums, roiling guitars, tumultuous bass sounds and its military rhythmic attack is like music for battle but could also be a requiem for a dead affair (“I’m not sure you’re trying to be anything, to do anything, but fill the silence”). Falter shifts dramatically between the unadorned singing parts and the bits where the music powerfully charges back in. It is evidently in Irish rockers’ genes to be unironic and emotional: this has the clatter and thrum of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. The singer’s voice swoops low and soars high, expressing urgency and thwarted passion.

All their EPs are available on Spotify, and all are worth checking out, because they remind you that even music this old-fashioned, or unfashionable, has value and can be thrilling. Mint and Lime is the song with the stun-gun guitars that goes quiet-loud, or rather elegiac-eruptive. The guitars on Distant Shorelines have some of the shimmer of My Bloody Valentine, while the lyrics possess a Morrissey-esque flamboyance (“Addicted to the cause/seduced by the tales of the romantic man I once was”).

The latest single, November Sun, finds the singer channelling Jim Morrison and Ian McCulloch (the dark side of the croon, basically), while the guitars are distinctly Edge-y. The references to “my majestic statuette” and “the solace that breaks through” might be too much for some, but others may welcome the pretentious buffoonery, the return of the pompous ass, just in time to take some of the windiness out of Bono’s sails.